Combat Compendium

Grindfreak has asked me to write up a supplement to his Mutilate information thread, but with an emphasis on Combat builds. I'll start this off by saying that this thread is a generalized source of information; not the end all be all. That would be your handy dandy spreadsheet. Most of my information is pulled from Elitist Jerks and other such sources, and credited to them by default. This sheet is accurate for patch 3.3; and will be updated accordingly whenever I get time and care enough to fix it. And we're off!

Go go gadget Combat!

Specs:

Combat generally has one spec, with points that will float between Vile Poisons and Improved Poisons, depending on gear and buffs. I've put the weapon skill as swords for simplicity; the Combat tree looks the same for Mace or CQC. The only way to find which split between Vile/Improved is best for your gear is the spreadsheet. Period. Asking for help will result in the same response every time, so just dont' do it.

Weapon Specs:

There are 3 weapon spec choices as of now. CQC for daggers and fists, Sword, and Maces. The weapon specs are all roughly equal, and it will come down to your particular gear to determine which is best. Currently, fist/dagger are the best itemized weapons, so in wishlist gear, CQC will come out ahead.

Poison Choices:

You will want to use Instant Poison IX on your MH, and Deadly Poison IX on your offhand. Wound Poison is not viable as a main poison anymore; it might have it's place as a debuff but only under those circumstances.

Rotation:

The rotation for Combat has changed sharply as ArP has become more prevalent. It is now fairly easy to reach the point where a Ruptureless build is better dps, not to mention easier and smoother to maintain. Whether your gear can support a Ruptureless rotation, or how much dps you'll be giving up to do so, can only be found through the spreadsheet. That said, it's generally not hard especially if you pick up an ArP proc trinket and have gear with a decent amount of passive ArP on it, such as stuff from the new 5mans.

Your goal is to maintain 100% SnD uptime. A general ratio of dps loss from a dropped SnD is about 6:1; meaning it is better to refresh 6 seconds early than let it expire for 1 second. There is no right or wrong combo point number to refresh with; do it as late as possible without capping energy or dropping it.

Combat has no benefit to starting from stealth. Hit your tank with Tricks Of the Trade, run in, and start your rotation. It's recommended to start off with a 1/2 point SnD, and then fall into your rotation. Starting by Tricksing another DPS is certainly possible, but remember that accidentally killing someone by giving them too much threat is a far greater DPS loss than the difference between the tank and that person for a single Tricks.

Unlike Mutilate, Combat has several cooldowns to work into their rotations; these are Killing Spree, Blade Flurry, and Adrenaline Rush. KS and BF are both on 2 min cooldowns, which reflects nicely with most on use trinkets. AR is on a 3 minute. KS can be glyphed down to 1:15, and becomes harder to stack. Unless you're saving it for a specific burn phase, using it as soon as it becomes available is generally your best bet. The availability of Heroism, and its Horde counterpart Bloodlust, can alter your cooldown usage. It's beneficial to stack your trinket and BF combo (and they should ALWAYS be stacked) during H/BL. If you are unsure when H/BL will be used, pop your cooldowns early in order to have them come up again as often as possible.

KS is much harder to use correctly, due to its mechanics. If the boss has any kind of frontal attack (cleave, breath) or rear attack (dragon tail swipe), you are at risk of being insta-gibbed by either. When in doubt, remember that a dead Rogue puts out the least dps of all. If you can use it safely, you should use it frequently and when you have emptied your energy bar, as you will regain a substantial amount during the attacks and want to minimize energy capping as much as possible.

Stats:

EP weights are not static, and will vary with gear and raid buffs. A rough list is:

The 237 vs. 315 is dependent on spell hit reduction raid debuffs on the boss. Poisons use spell hit and spell crit numbers, which is why there are 2 different thresholds to be aware of. Alliance Rogues also can receive the Heroic Presence buff from any Dranaei in their GROUP. This will lower the spells cap to 210.

Expertise is of less use to Combat, with Weapon Expertise lowering the gear requirement and Surprise Attacks removing the dodged finishers. The cap from attacking from behind is still 26/26 on your character screen.

All EP weights are assuming BiS with full raid buffs/debuffs. If you don't get all of these, please, check the spreadsheet.

Glyphs, Gems, and Enchants

Gems

Combat gemming is putting heavy emphasis on ArP, in order to close in on either the soft or hard cap. It's generally not a huge increase over Agi or AP, so it's up to the spreadsheet, your wallet, and your desire for min/max to decide which to do with. If you're dual-speccing between Combat and Mutilate, keep in mind that ArP is a poor choice for Mutilate so AP or Agi might be a better choice.

We are also closing in on the crit cap, so be careful of your Agi gems and Agi/Crit yellows. AP and AP/Haste is a very safe alternative.

Gemming for socket bonus' is not as easy to determine. You will generally want to check the spreadsheet, unless it's a 2nd or 3rd blue socket.

Gem choices are far more spread out now, with AP/Haste/Agi/ArP/Hit/Exp all having varying weights. Please use your spreadsheet, and plug values into WoWHead if you need to see what's available. The only for sure choice is Nightmare Tear for a blue gem to fulfill meta requirements.

Re: Combat Compendium

I advice you to use Agility Gems instead of Attack Power. 1 agility = 1 attack power and it can be increased bybuffs like Gift of the wild, DK's Horn, Elixirs, Food buffs etc. and with Greater Blessing of Kings it bids your agility with 10% of the total amount of it. It's much better than attack power gems because ap cannot be increased with GBoK. Agility also gives some crit bonus. Yesterday i decided to change all my gems form attack power to agility. I had 5x 32 ap and 3x 54 ap (as a Jewelcrafter) and i replaced them with 5x 16 agility and 3x 27 agility. My ap went down for about 170 and agility increased for 181. Also my Crit percentage increased by 1.8%. I haven't already tried to find out how it works on raids but i'm sure it'll be better now.

Re: Combat Compendium

Originally Posted by Kizior

I advice you to use Agility Gems instead of Attack Power. 1 agility = 1 attack power and it can be increased bybuffs like Gift of the wild, DK's Horn, Elixirs, Food buffs etc. and with Greater Blessing of Kings it bids your agility with 10% of the total amount of it. It's much better than attack power gems because ap cannot be increased with GBoK. Agility also gives some crit bonus. Yesterday i decided to change all my gems form attack power to agility. I had 5x 32 ap and 3x 54 ap (as a Jewelcrafter) and i replaced them with 5x 16 agility and 3x 27 agility. My ap went down for about 170 and agility increased for 181. Also my Crit percentage increased by 1.8%. I haven't already tried to find out how it works on raids but i'm sure it'll be better now.

The reason Agi get's a rating of 2, meaning equal to AP is BECAUSE it gives crit and get's buffed by kings. Otherwise AP is better then AGI.

Re: Combat Compendium

I've got a question.
Assuming a lack of warrior tank or dps warrior putting up sunders as well as a regular amount of melee dps in a 25 man group.

Would it be more beneficial to raid dps for the combat rogue to use a Zs/Xr/Ye/Qexpose (our combat rogue can often work it in) or even swapping the Ye for expose armor in his cycles when he cant make it fit on top of his 5s/5r/5e rotation?

Re: Combat Compendium

Originally Posted by Kizior

I advice you to use Agility Gems instead of Attack Power. 1 agility = 1 attack power and it can be increased bybuffs like Gift of the wild, DK's Horn, Elixirs, Food buffs etc. and with Greater Blessing of Kings it bids your agility with 10% of the total amount of it. It's much better than attack power gems because ap cannot be increased with GBoK. Agility also gives some crit bonus. Yesterday i decided to change all my gems form attack power to agility. I had 5x 32 ap and 3x 54 ap (as a Jewelcrafter) and i replaced them with 5x 16 agility and 3x 27 agility. My ap went down for about 170 and agility increased for 181. Also my Crit percentage increased by 1.8%. I haven't already tried to find out how it works on raids but i'm sure it'll be better now.

There are 3 raid buffs that also increase your AP by 10%. And the crit is already accounted for. Like I said, it's much closer for Combat, but AP gems do have a very slight edge in pure dps min/maxing.

Originally Posted by Javanface

I've got a question.
Assuming a lack of warrior tank or dps warrior putting up sunders as well as a regular amount of melee dps in a 25 man group.

Would it be more beneficial to raid dps for the combat rogue to use a Zs/Xr/Ye/Qexpose (our combat rogue can often work it in) or even swapping the Ye for expose armor in his cycles when he cant make it fit on top of his 5s/5r/5e rotation?

Depends on the fight length and how heavy the melee dps is (and what type). If there is a Warrior at all, then Rogues should never be doing it. If there's not, the swap over is fairly prohibitive, but not impossible depending on raid makeup.

Re: Combat Compendium

Originally Posted by ant1pathy

There are 3 raid buffs that also increase your AP by 10%. And the crit is already accounted for. Like I said, it's much closer for Combat, but AP gems do have a very slight edge in pure dps min/maxing.

Not all too sure, now that the envenom-glyph got scrapped, but i am still pretty sure that you'll get a higher percentage of poison-dmg coming 3.1, compared to now at least. (At least it's gonna be an increase of WP-procs on the MH, seeing as the procchance of it will be somewhat close to 80% with the ppm-change.)
Sooo... the spec a combat-rogue should choose will probably be 18/51/2, seeing as you'll have higher poison-dmg AND as you'll try to increase it further aswell. (3/3 Vile + 2/5 RS over 5/5 RS, i believe. At least with 3.1)

in case i didn't talk bullshit so far, i believe that AP will turn out to be a very little bit stronger than Agi with 3.1

It's astonishing how confused people get when a sentence does not end as they potato.

Re: Combat Compendium

Now, I'm no expert, but as I was skipping through, I read "it's better to have a hard hitting weapon" for Sword Specialization. Yes, your main hand will be slow if you're using a sword, but Sword Specializiation isn't something that boosts that. It is a % of another attack. A faster wep has more chances with less damage, a slower wep has more damage per attack with less damage. This is like the age old haste issue with 1 sec and 2 damage, and 2 seconds and 4 damage example.

I'm just tired of people saying one thing, that's not exactly opposite from the truth, but is sidetracked from it(I.E., "slow is better", when it is EQUAL, but you will not see somebody using a fast one for completely different reasons. That's like backwards assumptions.

/philosophy-misconception rant over.

Other than that...uh(looks around at the awkwardness created by the previous statement...) nice job!

Re: Combat Compendium

Originally Posted by Ilfayt

Now, I'm no expert, but as I was skipping through, I read "it's better to have a hard hitting weapon" for Sword Specialization. Yes, your main hand will be slow if you're using a sword, but Sword Specializiation isn't something that boosts that. It is a % of another attack. A faster wep has more chances with less damage, a slower wep has more damage per attack with less damage. This is like the age old haste issue with 1 sec and 2 damage, and 2 seconds and 4 damage example.

Not exactly.

Sword Specialization will also be triggered by off-hand swing and abilities. The effect of Sword Specialization is "An extra swing with main-hand weapon". In short: off-hand proc = main-hand extra attack.

Now you can see, it's NOT the "2 damage per sec or 4 damage per 2 sec" question. Since you've specced combat, the off-hand is always fast weapon for Combat Potency. And that's why slow main-hand is more powerful than fast ones.

Originally Posted by Ilfayt

I'm just tired of people saying one thing, that's not exactly opposite from the truth, but is sidetracked from it(I.E., "slow is better", when it is EQUAL, but you will not see somebody using a fast one for completely different reasons. That's like backwards assumptions.

The only reason that would make you "feel" a fast main-hand being better, is the poison damage.

Generally the poison damage is 18%~20% of total damage as a combat rogue, while Sinister strike is 21%~22% and auto-attack is 38%~41%. If your DPS composition is different, you'd probably doing you rotations wrong.

Re: Combat Compendium

Originally Posted by ant1pathy

Depends on the fight length and how heavy the melee dps is (and what type). If there is a Warrior at all, then Rogues should never be doing it. If there's not, the swap over is fairly prohibitive, but not impossible depending on raid makeup.

Aye I know this much, but at the moment we seem to be running with a feral druid, DK and pala tank more often than not, and our only fury warrior is on a holiday for a few more weeks which prompted this discussion in guild.

As for the fight length, it'll usually be between 3-4 minutes on average I guess, a little shorter for some bosses, a little longer for others. And we do run a melee-heavy setup most of the time with a ret pala, dps dk, two rogues, enh shaman and dps feral. So thats 6 melee. Provided this, what do you think? I'm not afraid to do the work myself, but I haven't really got an idea where to start.